Free kibbles

STATES RIGHTS:

The federal government battles Hawaii over census worker charged with trespassing. Go Hawaii!

SOCIALISM:

Leftists trying to capitalize in the BP oil spill to nationalize the oil industry.

Another giveaway to the unions:

"The Wall Street Journal reports that the National Mediation Board, which is the federal agency that oversees airline labor relations, ruled last month that “unions can be formed if a majority of unionization votes are cast in their favor,” reversing a 70 year industry practice of counting non-votes as no votes."

Obama was worth every dime and more unions paid for him.

TAX AND SPEND:

Cities in the US are in worse fiscal shape than Greece.

This is scary:

Who are America's fastest-growing class of millionaires? They are police officers, firefighters, teachers and federal bureaucrats who, unless things change drastically, will be paid something near their full salaries every year--until death--after retiring in their mid-50s.

We're the stupidest people in the world.

EDUCATION:

Washington D.C., home of some of the worst schools in America, is giving unionized teachers a 21.6 percent raise. Have I mentioned we're the stupidest people in the world?

A bunch of stupid aristocrats in main are forcing schools to have co-ed bathrooms, sports teams and whatnot. Acknowledging differences between boys and girls is not discrimination. They should be celebrated, not forcibly ignored. Stop the insanity.

Thomas Sowell refutes the liberal mantra for grad - don't go into government work and be burden on your fellow men. Do them a service and work in the private sector.

HEALTH CARE:

Seeing the doctor online. My doctor doesn't do much. He listens to me. Checks my blood pressure and listens to my chest. A USB stethoscope and blood pressure meter is all that would be needed.

"Using an electronic stethoscope that a paramedic on the rig held in place, Dr. Oscar W. Boultinghouse, an emergency medicine physician in Houston, listened to Mr. Martin’s heart.

“The extreme pain strongly suggested a kidney stone,” Dr. Boultinghouse said later. A urinalysis on the rig confirmed the diagnosis, and Mr. Martin flew to his home in Mississippi for treatment."

They could even make take-home urinalysis and blood testing from finger prick kits.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Sea level is not rising. Many islands are experiencing local sea level reductions.

WAR:

The al Qaeda leader recently reported killed has been reported killed twice before. I don't know what to believe. It also seems that there's lots of al Qaeda number threes. Since we don't know their names, they might as well call all of them number threes. We know bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, so they can't claim they killed one or two, but they get a lot of mileage out of claiming they killed number three.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

16 Mexicans suing American rancher who stopped them at gunpoint for trespassing. We're our own worst enemies. Trespassing is not a civil right. The court should stand up for private property rights and throw this case you, but that's unlikely to happen. The rest of world is pointing at laughing at us for being so stupid.

"The immigrants are represented at trial by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), which also charged that Sheriff Dever did nothing to prevent Mr. Barnett from holding their clients at "gunpoint, yelling obscenities at them and kicking one of the women.""

How much you want to bet that MALDEF is at least partially funded by taxpayers?

"The lawsuit said he then called his wife and two Border Patrol agents arrived at the site. It also said Mr. Barnett acknowledged that he had turned over 12,000 illegal immigrants to the Border Patrol since 1998.

In March, U.S. District Judge John Roll rejected a motion by Mr. Barnett to have the charges dropped, ruling there was sufficient evidence to allow the matter to be presented to a jury. Mr. Barnett's attorney, David Hardy, had argued that illegal immigrants did not have the same rights as U.S. citizens."

Heroic property owner abused by government.

Pictures from illegal immigrant rallies you didn't see in the news. The media makes stuff up about the tea parties but it hides stuff about leftist rallies.

FOREIGN POLICY:

I'm struck by the Orwellian nature of the claims that the Israeli commandos were just defending themselves. Sailing an aid ship into a harbor, or a ship with weapons for that matter, is a peaceful act. Forcibly boarding a ship is an act of aggression. The Israelis are indisputably the aggressors here, and aggressors can't claim they were just defending themselves. I'm not condemning the blockade. Hamas is waging war on Israel, and until that ends, the blockade makes sense. It would have been fine if the Israelis had turned the ships away as part of the blockade. Boarding the ship is not part of the blockade; it's an act of aggression. It doesn't matter that the flotilla was intended to create an incident. The Israelis initiated the aggression. Obama should condemn both sides.

Getting US troops out of Japan is in our interests, not just in Japanese interests.

LOCAL:

Local black leaders want to change Dayton's hiring practices from hiring the top candidates to selection from among more candidates in order to favor blacks. No. Hire the top candidates.

MISC:

Contrast by Apollo astronaut between the handling of the Apollo 13 crisis and the handling of the Gulf oil spill highlights what I've been saying, but haven't said very well.

"With no single, competent, courageous and knowledgeable leader in charge of a comparably competent, courageous and knowledgeable team as we had with Apollo 13, the Administration has been doomed to failure from the start."

You can't have multiple leaders when trying to solve a critical engineering problem. You have to have one leader who has all the power necessary to solve the problem. He uses that power to impanel a team of the top experts from all over the world to brainstorm on all available options, thinking inside and outside the box without fear of repercussions from anything they consider, and come up with a prioritized series of options.

"Absolutely no reason exists to assume that any part of the Federal Government has engineering expertise comparable to the petroleum industry that can be applied to this or any future energy-related crisis. Certainly, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu have no more experience in these matters than does the President.

Salazar’s empty threat to “push BP out of the way” has no basis as a realistic option and best illustrates the floundering of the Obama Administration. Indeed, from “day one,” the expertise of the entire U.S. and British drilling and production industry should have been mobilized to combat this spill, with a single experienced engineering manager in charge. It still is not too late to start doing it right."

That's exactly right. The Obama administration is keeping this from happening. Instead, Obama is keeping the government's boot on BP's neck. It's trying to be in charge when it has no capability of being in charge. It's investigating to bring civil and criminal charges, distracting the experts from solving this problem and warping their priorities. To solve this problem, government must get out of the way. It should make government experts (if there are any, which I strongly doubt there are) available to the team. It should make resources available to the team. It should help persuade people requested by the team leader to join the team if they're reluctant and to get resources from other governments if necessary. But other than that, get out of the way.

"The lessons from the 204 fire were applied and we moved on. In contrast, President Obama’s and his Administration’s otherwise rambling response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been to stop offshore oil exploration by the United States. How misguided and, indeed, how either ignorant or devious can our President be!?"

No kidding.

I think bringing in James Cameron to help think outside the box about stopping the oil link is a fine idea, but I'd prefer the real underwater expert who found the Titanic - Ballard. This effort should be run by BP, not the government.

Healy makes another great point in The Cult of the Presidency:

"Today, one often hears the argument that the president needs broad war powers because the survival of the nation is at stake. But is our survival as a nation really more tenuous today than it was in the late 18th century, when the United States was small frontier republic on the edge of a continent occupied by periodically hostile great powers and Indian marauders? In that dangerous environment, the Framers drafted, and the country ratified, a Constitution that sharply limited emergency powers and rejected the idea that the president was above the law."

Any claim that we face a greater threat today than then is laughable. The Constitution means what it says in good times and bad.

FDR's motive for wanting war with Japan - staying in power.

In praise of sea salt.

We're finally to the point where BP may not survive the liability from this spill. If government stays out of the way, the market will extract the correct punishment, and the oil drilling will become safer for it.

Happy 80th birthday to Clint Eastwood.

I strongly disagree that to be libertarian, you have to be anti-nuke. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrent and without being used have saved countless millions of lives that would otherwise have been lost in all-out wars like WWI and WWII. The breadth and death tolls from wars had been consistently growing for centuries until the development of the nuclear bomb put a stop to them. I don't think our nuclear capability or anything else should be funded by theft - taxes - but I would certainly volunteer funds to make sure the US had a strong nuclear deterrent and I hope enough others would as well. I also don't think Heinlein was a libertarian. I haven't read much Heinlein because I was never a fan, but I guess I should read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.